The Politics of Game of Thrones

Why is Westeros mired in 8,000 years of economic stagnation? Should Daenerys firebomb King’s Landing to prevent a longer war? The world of Game of Thrones is teeming with fascinating interactions between institutions, incentives, and power that creates a sweeping geopolitical mega-saga just begging to be theorized. An examination of these issues through the lens of economics, law, international relations, and power politics promises to be both instructive and entertaining. The day after the Season 7 finale airs, join the Cato Institute and the R Street Institute in an exploration of the intrigue and game theory (and inevitable analogies to our current political landscape) that pervade the world of ice and fire.

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Caleb Watney: Well, welcome. Thank you for
coming today to our Politics of Game of Thrones panel. So,
this is a panel that is cohosted by the R Street Institute and the Cato Institute. My name
is Caleb Watney. I am a tech policy analyst at the R Street Institute and
I’ll be your moderator for the evening. We are so excited to have
all of you here, and thanks for all of you joining online. I know
we are going to have a really interesting conversation today. To
start off, I’d like to ask all of you to silence your phones, but
please do not turn them off. We’d love all of you to join in on the
conversation on Twitter, using the hashtag #GOTpolitics, which
you can find, also, on the bottom of the screen behind me. We will
also be taking some questions towards the end for the panel from
Twitter and from
the live audience, so I’d love to see your thumbs twiddling. We
also have a Snapchat filter, which many of you
may already know, but if you don’t, it’s there. So be sure to use
that. Before we officially begin, I’d just like to give a brief
note on why are we doing this. I think kind of a common refrain
that I hear whenever I bring up this topic is you know, obviously
Game of Thrones is set in the setting it is because George
R. R. Martin just really likes writing about swordfights and, you
know, we don’t need to analyze any further into why, you know, they
are stuck in a particular place and technological progress, or what
the institutions and the incentives of the world are, because they
are all just created because George R. R. Martin wants it to be
that way. But one, that misses out on a lot of fun. You know, we
are all nerds. We all love politics and economics and so might as
well apply our tools and our interests to this world that we love
and enjoy. Secondly, I think George R. R. Martin would have wanted
it. I wanted to read here, there is a really good quote. He is
talking about one of his main mentors, Tolkien. And he says,
“Ruling is hard. And this was my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much
as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had
a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man the
land would prosper. We look at history and it’s not that simple.
Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred
years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien didn’t ask the
question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing
army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about
all those orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone and all of
the orcs aren’t gone — they’re in the mountains. Did Aragon
pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them all? Even the
little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?” So, I think, you
know, George R. R. Martin is certainly one with an eye for
world-building, and I think it’s a testament, really, to his
writing that we can draw implications of the system and of the
world he’s built that go far beyond his original, I think, view of
the world. And then, finally, I think this gives us a valuable
opportunity to examine the way that institutions, philosophy, and
incentives can affect economic development, even in a fictional
world. In some ways, we can use fiction to run simulations of our
own history over and over again, changing subtle variables and
seeing what might have happened. What would human society have
looked like if our winters were unpredictable and lasted years at a
time? What is magic and dragons existed? Presumably these changes
would have had big effects on our economic and political
development, but in what ways? And those are the kinds of questions
that we are here to answer tonight. So, without further ado, I will
introduce our panelists. I am going to keep it short because you
should really know all of these people already, but we have,
immediately to my right, Peter Suderman, who is a senior editor at
Reason.
He writes regularly on healthcare, the federal budget, tech policy,
and pop culture. He is also a pop culture columnist for Vox. Next, we have Matt
Yglesias, who is a cofounder and executive editor at Vox.com, where he
writes on basically every policy topic imaginable, including
Game of Thrones. He is also the author of the book most
recently, The
Rent is Too Damn High. Next, we have Ilya Somin, who is an
adjunct scholar here at the Cato Institute. He is also a professor
of law at the George Mason University. He is the
author of numerous books, his most recent of which is the second
edition of Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why
Smaller Government is Smarter. And, finally, we have
Alyssa Rosenberg, who is a culture columnist at the Washington
Post’s opinion section and, in my opinion, she gives some
of the smartest critiques of the series in her weekly reviews at
the Post.

Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, thank you. That’s very
nice of you to say.

Caleb Watney: So, these are our panelists and
we have many questions to talk about. Broadly we will be talking in
four major categories: economics, international relations, law, and
culture, and then we’ll be taking some audience questions towards
the end. But first, because I know you guys are all wondering, what
did you think of the episode last night?

Peter Suderman: I mean, it’s a mixed bag,
right? It’s pretty exciting, but this season has really felt
different than a lot of the previous seasons. It has been much
faster, much more plot-driven, and much more cinematic. I think we
saw all of that last night. It’s really big in a way that is very
crowd-pleasing, that’s kind of driven by fan service, by a desire
to show off what they can do in terms of effects on a TV budget. At
the same time, I think it lacks some of the sort of nuanced,
methodical, character-driven pacing of the previous seasons, in
particular of the kind of the best seasons, two, three, and four.
And so, we’re just not, you know, the show has changed in some ways
and, like I said, it’s very exciting, very thrilling. It’s also in
some ways a little bit disappointing, a little bit frustrating at
this point.

Matt Yglesias: Well, I was saying to Peter
before the panel started that the last time I was here at
Cato it was for
a discussion of William Fischel’s latest book about
zoning, and the turnout wasn’t quite as high. And, so, I was
very glad to see that in the most recent episode we had that little
discussion of the size of King’s Landing and the sort of possible
economic benefits of urban agglomeration and…

Peter Suderman: So you really liked it.

Matt Yglesias: …I finally got the zoning
angle for Game of Thrones that I have been needing
professionally.

Ilya Somin: It so happens that I am a property
professor, among other things, so I, too, write about zoning. It is
one of the relatively few issues that Matt and I tend to agree
about, that there is too much zoning. That may also be the case in
King’s Landing, where it seems like although there may be a million
people there, there are not enough poor people who are able to move
there and find financial opportunities. That is why, as Tyrion
says, the wages in King’s Landing are higher than they are in the
north, and yet not very many workers have moved from the north to
King’s Landing. That said, I tend to agree with Peter’s assessment
of the episode in the season. I think this does have some of the
virtues we associate with Game of Thrones. There is some
great dialogue, some great acting, and some great set-piece scenes.
On the other hand, the plot has been moving on in an onrush that
increasingly doesn’t make a lot of sense in some cases. The rules
of the world have been broken repeatedly, or, perhaps, there has
been an unanticipated burst of technological development, such as
ravens that fly at the speed of light…

Alyssa Rosenberg: Zombie ice dragons.

Ilya Somin: …yes…

Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean, zombie ice dragons
are the big…

Ilya Somin: Well, that, actually, is not
inconsistent with the rules of the world.

Alyssa Rosenberg: It’s a technological
development, though, Ilya.

Ilya Somin: The rules of a fictional world. It
isn’t consistent with our world, I think. But, on the other hand,
in Game of Thrones we have a sense of how fast armies and
ships and the like can move or be built, but now we have Euron
mass-producing a thousand ships in a few months, and we have armies
moving at the speed of World War II panzer divisions, and other
such developments. And I understand why the needs of the plot
require this, but it’s somewhat unfortunate. There is also, I
think, some plot-driven stupidity by some of the characters, which
occurred during this season, such as in the ill-fated white
expedition, which we might talk about later. That said, whatever
they are doing, they must be doing something right because we are
all still watching the movie and this event has a much —
watching the show — this event has a much bigger turnout than
any other think-tank panel that I have ever been on, so you can’t
criticize them too much.

Alyssa Rosenberg: All I’m saying is that if the
Cato Institute
has me on as a fellow to essentially be the resident expert on ice
zombies and, you know, horns that bring down giant walls and, you
know, the Lord of Light, I can guarantee this kind of turnout ever
week. So, clearly, you know, I am doing something right. So, as the
resident person who gets paid to sit around and read 900-page
fantasy novels rather than know anything about zoning, and, as
someone who cares a lot about these novels, I found the end of this
season really frustrating. Are we operating, this is a
spoiler-filled zone, okay? Everyone here cool with that? I’m not
going to break anybody’s heart if I start talking in great and
nerdy detail? I think the thing that I found really frustrating
about this, the end of this season of Game of Thrones, is
that it made me feel foolish for having taken the text seriously.
And, most importantly, for having taken seriously the idea that
there was an underlying magical set of rules and structures that
was supposed to be emerging over the course of the novels that
would, perhaps, be surprising, but would make the world of the show
make sense. And, you know, a lot of what happened in this season
was casting these sorts of things aside. You know, we’ve had seven
seasons worth of discussions about what it would take to bring down
the wall, a structure that is built by, you know, one of the
founding sort of people of Westeros that theoretically has special
magical protection and oh, it just takes ice zombies. It’s not the
horn of winter, it’s not that there is, you know, anything special
about what has to happen here, it’s just a special effect. I also
just felt like the series treated us a little bit like we were
stupid for the first time. I mean this is a show that lays down
breadcrumbs for you. Who here was not aware that R plus L equaled J
before, say, the fourth episode of this season? Anyone willing to
raise a hand and brave that confession? I mean, this is a series
where, if you watch it closely, you’ll figure things out. You don’t
actually need a, you know, sort of grumpy kid who has been spending
too much time communing with a tree to give you a monologue that
explains where someone came from. And so, I felt like this was not
the version of the show that is its best self, either as sort of a
dense fantasy text or as a sort of grand television spectacle, and
that was a little bit of a bummer.

Caleb Watney: Well, I appreciate all of your
honesty in terms of a blatant assessment of the show. Without
further ado, we will move to our first section, which is economics.
So, I think a good way of kind of being introduced to these ideas
and a lot of the institutions that form this world that we are all
very much enthralled with is sort of the big question. Westeros, as
far as we know, has 8,000 years of recorded history. The last major
economic development that we are aware of was the invention of
steel when the Andals invaded about 6,000 years ago. And in the
meantime, you know, we have developed driverless cars 2,000 years
after the invention of steel. 6,000 years later, though, they are
still stuck in basically the same world. And I think that begs the
question: Why? And I think lots of people have interesting ideas in
here. Some people have suggested it’s like a scarcity of dragons,
or maybe it is the volatility of seasonal patterns makes it
difficult it plan, or, you know, maybe the Maesters need
institutional reform and they are holding back progress, but I
would love to know the thoughts of our panelists.

Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean, if I can start with
the really nerdy response, in the novels, and to a lesser extent in
the show, there is the idea that there was this city called Valyria
that was kind of a legendary city of wonder, a place of great
innovation, magic, lots of dragons, plenty of Targaryens, that was
destroyed in this mysterious catastrophe. And so, to a certain
extent, you can look at Game of Thrones as a story not
about a society where technological and economic advancement has
stopped, but where something that has been sort of — there is
an event that has yet to be explained and maybe will never be
explained that either slowed progress or, kind of through
development into the past. I would note that there are — you
have things like wildfires, you have developments in, I think,
weapons production, but less so in sort of the economy, or the
everyday economy itself.

Ilya Somin: Yeah. So, Westeros does have
several factors that economic theorists and historians point to as
slowing down growth. One is actually longstanding political unity.
For hundreds or thousands of years the Targaryens dominated
Westeros in a single unified state and, historically, competition
between states, like in early modern Europe, for example, has been
important to economic development. Secondly, the institution of the
Maesters probably is a problem. They monopolize, for the most part,
at least intellectual development and scientific thought and the
like, and that slows progress. Moreover, they are oriented to just
conserving existing knowledge, like recovering old manuscripts and
the like rather than creating new knowledge, and they don’t even do
a very good job of conserving the existing knowledge, as we’ve seen
in this current season. So, that’s potentially a problem. The fact
that there is a severe winter that lasts many years and comes along
periodically, that may hold up progress. Some people also claim
that the presence of magic and dragons may hold down technological
development, though I am not sure this is correct. I would think
there are some technologies that are actually synergistic with
magic or with dragons that can work well along with them, like, you
know, luxury compartments that can help you fly on a dragon, or
make better use of dragons and the like…

Ilya Somin: It’s a limited market at first,
but, well, at first only the rich could fly jets. Today, almost
everybody can. You would imagine at first only a few wealthy
people, dragon queens or whatnot, can fly on a dragon, but as you
breed more transport dragons and so forth over time, maybe the
average common person of Westeros could commute by dragon, and the
like.

Alyssa Rosenberg: Don’t you get into resource
problems there, though? I mean, dragons need to eat a lot to keep
growing, so…

Ilya Somin: There’s a whole big continent.

Alyssa Rosenberg: What population of dragons
can Westeros actually support?

Peter Suderman: Is there a dragon production
facility, and what are the regulations that are prohibiting it from
being more effective?

Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, obviously the dragon
pit is an example of overregulation, right?

Ilya Somin: So, the dragon pit was actually a
late development, but early on, of course, the Targaryens did try
to monopolize the breeding of dragons for the obvious reason that
they didn’t want anybody else to have any and offset their military
advantage. So, there are all these factors that may stifle economic
development. That said, I frankly don’t think there are enough to
lead to anything like 6,000 years of total stagnation, and even
0.1% growth per year should have led to a lot more development than
you actually have here, so I feel like either there’s sort of
supernatural forces that are creating economic stagnation, maybe
the gods of the seven, or sort of the other gods in the show, or to
suggest the needs of the plot where you want 6,000 years of
medieval history and background as opposed to 6,000 years of
technological development.

Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, we’re at Cato, so I
also have to ask isn’t a monarchy a problem? I mean, you have the
contrast between Westeros, which is dominated by, you know, a royal
monarchy and a bunch of sort of stagnant, noble houses, and then
you have the free cities like Braavos and Volantis…

Ilya Somin: And why aren’t they developing
more? That’s actually an even bigger mystery than why Westeros
doesn’t develop, because Essos, unlike Westeros, does have many of
the preconditions for development. There is competition between
jurisdictions, there is trade, there is financial
institutions…

Alyssa Rosenberg: There is a new service
economy — you have the Faceless Men.

Ilya Somin: Yeah, there’s an excellent service
economy. They have servants of all kinds, including some for sale,
right?

Matt Yglesias: I mean I do think that the Essos
contrast is key to sort of think about this, because the social
institutions over there are so different and it seems to me that
Essos is portrayed as somewhat more prosperous than Westeros. They
have a more sophisticated society, a somewhat higher level of
material culture, but it’s not fundamentally different even though
they have what seems like a more conducive to growth sort of system
of political fragmentation. They don’t have Maesters monopolizing
knowledge. They are still held back by something. I think that you
have to assume that it has something to do with the seasons, right?
The variable-length seasons are so prominent in the world-building
and the mythology of Planetos that they must be playing a critical
role here, because it’s not really clear to me that the plot in any
way does require the 6,000 years of stagnation, right? If you just
kind of chopped some zeros off a few of those numbers, I don’t know
that anything in the core of the story that we have seen would
actually look all that different, just as the multi-length seasons
have not played a crucial role in what we’ve seen so far, but we do
know that these are sort of two pillars of world-building, right?
That the society is very old, and the society is afflicted by a
very odd, sort of, weather. And there must be some kind of linkage
between them, that probably a huge amount of the savings and
planning that exists is very narrowly focused on trying to preserve
food for the winters, right, rather than on building up other kinds
of productive resources. It also must really make it difficult. I
was joking about zoning but it’s hard to develop the kind of
agricultural surpluses that would let you have cities and more
specialization of labor when you not only need to grow enough food
to feed people, but you need to grow enough food to feed people
sort of through an unknown, no harvest, three, four, six, seven
— we don’t even know how long these winters last, but you can
imagine that would be really sort of devastating to urban life, and
that it would impact both continents that we’ve seen even though
they have different kinds of societies. Another issue, potentially,
is coal. There is a tradition, in the historical literature, at any
rate, of arguing that the presence of coal deposits was really
critical to the industrial revolution in England. As far as we
know, they don’t have any of that there, for reasons that are
somewhat unclear, but it is possible that you simply can’t develop
the technology of industrialization without those kinds of natural
resources.

Caleb Watney: If I may just, quickly, on that
point — do you think that wildfire is stable enough? I mean,
it seems to be substance with the largest output per gram of any
substance we’ve seen in Westeros. Can wildfire be used to fuel an
energy renaissance?

Alyssa Rosenberg: I think part of the problem
is that you sort of can’t stop it once it’s started, right? It’s
not like it’s variable current. It’s, you know, you set it off, you
better be prepared to burn it for a long time.

Matt Yglesias: The Valeryans had some kind of
firepits, right?

Alyssa Rosenberg: You know, I would have to
check on that.

Matt Yglesias: That’s…

Peter Suderman: So, I mean part of the problem
here is that, so we have, with wildfire or with whatever, is beyond
all of these kinds of social technological explanations which I do
think have some merit, and I think the seasons are obviously a big
part of it, what Westeros and the rest of the world of Game of
Thrones lacks is the idea of progress. And you just don’t see
anyone in the show ever have a sense that things will be radically
different fifty, or a hundred, or five hundred years from now that
basically assumed that things will be the — people will still
be living in castles, and pulling carts behind them, and there may
be a few dragons around, but mostly we’ll do things with donkeys
and mules, and people will fight with swords. There’s not, for
example, there’s not a lot of science fiction that you can find in
the world of Game of Thrones, because people don’t have
this sense that the world of the future is one that is going to be
radically different, and that’s true in human history as well. The
idea of economic progress, of technological progress, is a
relatively new one and it’s an idea that is extremely powerful once
a society kind of gets it in its head, but it’s just not an idea
that has ever come to Westeros, that has ever come to the world of
Game of Thrones, and instead what they have is an idea
that everything is a zero-sum game, that everything is stagnant,
that either you win or you lose, or you bend the knee, and that’s
it. And when that’s the idea that everyone, including, and
especially, the people in power and the people who are the
leadership of the society and kind of set the tone for how a
society is going to think, then no one is going to think well,
let’s harness wildfire and figure out how to start an energy
revolution. They are just going to think wildfire is dangerous, I
guess we can use it as a weapon like we’ve always done for 6,000
years.

Alyssa Rosenberg: I want to push back on that
though a little bit, Peter, because you do have a number of
characters in the series who do see the possibility that things can
be different, that history can be different. Their focus just isn’t
economic, it’s social. You have Mance Rayder who is the king beyond
the wall who has this unbelievably daring idea of putting together
a confederation of people who will still be relatively free and
able to choose their leaders, but they’ll be unified for the first
time as a society and they’ll do this unbelievably daring thing of
relocating their entire society to a new place. To a certain
extent, Daenerys Targaryen has the same plan, right? I mean, she
wants to unify the folks in Slaver’s Bay, the Dothraki, she wants
to get the Dothraki to do something that they explicitly don’t do,
which is to cross the Narrow Sea, go to Westeros and to conquer and
then somehow assimilate into this new society, so I don’t think
it’s quite true that people don’t have an idea of what progress
looks like. I mean, you have Tyrion Lannister talking about
alternative governance strategies for Westeros. It’s just that
those people are thinking politically and socially, not
economically.

Ilya Somin: I would push back in some ways even
more in that I don’t think you have to have the idea of progress to
make progress. There wasn’t much in the way of an idea of progress
in the ancient world. The Greeks and Romans, they still made a lot
of progress. The actual Middle Ages, which, today, we think of oh,
that was a period of total stagnation, like in Westeros, maybe that
stereotype gave Martin the idea for what he did but there was
actually a lot of technological progress in the Middle Ages,
particularly in agriculture, in trade and shipbuilding, the
invention of the stirrup occurred during the early Middle Ages,
that was a big deal, the invention of crop rotation and other
agricultural techniques. And so even if people don’t have a grand
idea of progress, they might have an idea if I can harness wildfire
to help produce things I can make a lot of money. If I can build a
better mousetrap and catch more mice, you know, the lord or the
merchant will pay be more money than for the cruddy mousetrap which
is currently on the market and so forth, and those kinds of things
did cause progress in the Middle Ages at a slower rate than later,
but they did occur and it seems like in the world of Westeros there
are people who are entrepreneurial in that sort of way that we see.
We see merchants, we see the Iron Bank, we see people who do this
kind of thing and want to expect it over time. There would be
gradual technology progress even if poor institutions and poor
incentives prevented it from being as great as it could be.

Matt Yglesias: It is worth saying, I mean, I
don’t think that we know it’s been entirely stagnant, that we focus
mostly on the sort of military equipment that they fight with,
which appears very medieval. Plate mail, swords, things like that.
Their communication technology is much more advanced than medieval
Europe in terms of their well-trained birds. And their advances in
the life sciences and medicine seem to be beyond what we had in
medieval Europe, and that’s even before the resurrections and
things like that. You know, in the books they seem to have some
understand of how to disinfect wounds, for example, fairly
effectively. They have a moon tea, which seems to work for —
produce medical abortions, so there are some — we also, it’s
not entirely clear to me what the state of their shipbuilding
technology is, but at times Euron seems to be able to sail very
quickly.

Ilya Somin: And build ships very quickly,
too.

Matt Yglesias: Build ships very quickly, so,
you know we don’t — they clearly have not developed gunpowder
or the printing press, which are important, sort of marquis
inventions in real-world history, but there were some aspects in
which they have a very impressive technological domain, and we
don’t see much of consumer goods one way or the other and don’t
really know what exists there, and we, in particular, don’t know
what’s new. So, it’s possible that we are seeing a very, very slow
progress rather than an absolute stagnation.

Peter Suderman: On the other hand, the ravens
are getting much faster very rapidly.

Matt Yglesias: Yes.

Ilya Somin: So, they do have very advanced
genetic engineering of ravens which seem to have been developed in
the course of the season. Also, very fast shipbuilding and clearly
there must be mechanized armies at this point, because they are
moving at the rate of World War II armies rather than at the rate
of medieval armies, even at the rate that their own armies moved in
seasons two, three, and four during the War of the Five Kings.

Alyssa Rosenberg: Also, the Three-Eyed Raven
appears to be the internet.

Ilya Somin: Yeah.

Matt Yglesias: A tree Wikipedia.

Ilya Somin: And his information is much more
reliable than what you can get on the internet, too, so in that
respect they are more advanced technologically than we are.

Caleb Watney: So, it seems to me, specifically
in Westeros, the Maesters are a major barrier to progress. So, if
you were hired as Archmaester of the Citadel, what institutional
reforms would you undertake to facilitate growth in Westeros?

Alyssa Rosenberg: Admit women. Team Gilly!

Ilya Somin: I would break up the system of
citadels, make them independent, and they’d compete with each
other. It might have the same effect on technological and
philosophical development in Westeros that the Reformation had in
Western Europe, where the Catholic Church’s monopoly in
intellectual life was broken and you had competing centers. And
yes, including women, including other groups, including people who
don’t believe in a dominant religion. That would be a good thing,
too.

Matt Yglesias: Yeah, the effort also to create
the Maesters as a politically neutral institution, I can see why
they think that’s a good idea. It sounds very high-minded, but it
also seems, in many ways, counterproductive to having competing,
you know, efforts if different political authorities are trying to
be a friendly terrain to scholars to obtain and use more advanced
technology to take advantage of it. You can imagine both, sort of,
competition among the scholars, but also much more emphasis on, I’m
not sure if you would call it commercialization, but, at any rate,
putting information to use rather than kind of hoarding it in old
books. It seems bad. The use of celibacy as well as a sort of
requirement for entry is creating a very strong disincentive for
people to pursue any kind of knowledge or scholarship. You are
giving up any sort of claim to family life and certain aspects of
human pleasure and, you know, that doesn’t seem like a great
idea.

Ilya Somin: It wasn’t a great idea in Star
Wars, either, with the Jedi.

Caleb Watney: Yeah. So, just kind of —
sorry, Peter, did you want to go ahead?

Peter Suderman: I mean, I agree with all of
this. I guess I would just sort of say that what the Maesters
should be pushing for is liberal democratic self-government and you
know, and a kind of much more open and transparent society that is
not ruled by blood and by, you know, by authoritarians who may or
may not be nice and may or may not have the best interests of their
people at heart, and that is, you know, sort of traditionally a
function of, kind of, of academia and of political advisors, and it
is one that they are not fulfilling very well.

Caleb Watney: Certainly. So, next we are going
to move on to international relations, and I think a good entry
into this is Daenerys at the beginning of season seven. So, she has
alliances all over Westeros, she has a massive navy, and, most
importantly, she has three dragons. She considers whether or not
she should just go in and bomb King’s Landing and just kind of end
the war there, but she ultimately chooses not to. And I think you
can draw some comparisons there to the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Should she have firebombed King’s Landing, resulting
in massive civilian casualties but maybe ending the war more
decisively early, or did she end up doing the right thing?

Peter Suderman: She should have taken out the
Night King with her dragon before trying to save Jon. And, I mean,
once you’ve made — I don’t think I know about the first
decision. I have like a very strong idea. Obviously, you shouldn’t
like, you know, kill the thousands or millions of people in the
world that you’re trying to rule, but if you’re trying to destroy
the White Walkers, take out the White Walkers who it’s useful to
destroy. She had an opportunity and she missed it.

Matt Yglesias: I — the dragon fire also
seems to me to be a more targeted weapon than the dialogue
suggested. I mean it was a confusing thing where you are being told
that the only way to attack King’s Landing with the dragons would
be to destroy the whole city, but then you see the dragons aiming
very precise beams of fire, suggesting you could have just hit the
Red Keep and then, you know, maybe thrown in some firefighters
there. So, there were some odd plot dynamics in this season and
that, to me, was like really high on the list.

Ilya Somin: Yeah. So, this is an example of the
plot-driven stupidity that I was discussing earlier, that at the
end of season six you have a situation where Daenerys and her
allies have an enormous advantage over Cersei and her forces, but
the screenwriter needed some way for this conflict to drag out over
all of season seven, as opposed to Daenerys just coming in, taking
King’s Landing, crushing the Lannister resistance, and we are on to
something else relatively quickly, and it’s pretty obvious that
doing that not only would have been better strategy, but it would
have been more humane, too, because it would have saved a great
deal in terms of lives and treasure, even aside from the looming
war against the Night King. As already mentioned, you know, dragons
are not super precise, they may not be quite as good as drones, but
they’re not nuclear weapons either. You could probably burn down
just the palace plus whatever barracks the Lannister troops are in
and, you know, there would be some civilian casualties from that,
but not as many as you get from the fighting that actually occurs,
where Highgarden gets pillaged and a lot of it destroyed, or from
some of the other fighting that we see. Moreover, it could be that
a lot of Lannister troops and allies would just surrender once they
see the writing on the wall. Cersei isn’t exactly all that popular,
and so it could be that there would be even less casualties than
seemed to be the case. This is a sufficiently obvious strategy that
a competent military or political strategist should have just
suggested it to Daenerys and she should have readily agreed. The
only reason why they adopt Tyrion’s overcomplicated plan is that
that’s one of the few ways to make this part of the plot actually
interesting and exciting over a period of five or six episodes, as
opposed to just a rapid cakewalk where Daenerys destroys the enemy
forces. But maybe, maybe there’s a hidden feminist message here,
because Daenerys is forced to leave behind her best military
strategist in Essos, Daario Naharis, the mercenary leader who was
her friend with benefits, for the previous couple of seasons, and
he says why are you leaving me behind? A king would have no problem
bringing a mistress with him, so why shouldn’t the queen have the
same rights? She’s like no, I can’t afford to do this, the nobility
of Westeros wouldn’t like it if I were doing this and have to leave
open the possibility of a political marriage. So, because there is
this sexist double standard that Daenerys has to accommodate
herself to, many, many lives are lost because she has to rely on
Tyrion for her military advice, and while he’s a smart guy, he
clearly is not a competent military strategist.

Alyssa Rosenberg: Let’s talk about Daario
Naharis for a minute. I mean, I think obviously a sellsword who
helps you sneak into a couple of cities is not necessarily the
person who you need to help plan an invasion of conquest. I also
think it’s completely insane that she leaves him behind to rule
Slaver’s Bay and the fact that the series has not adequately
grappled with the fact that she has conquered the society and then
essentially left it behind to fall apart is really, really, really
screwed up to me, but, you know, I just write about them, I don’t
actually write them. I think that, to go back to the initial
comparison, it’s not quite apt, right? I mean, there’s a difference
between bombing a society that you simply want to get to submit to
you and that you’re going to leave and you’re going to go home. And
conquering a place that you expect to rule and to establish a
dynasty in for a very long time, you know, maybe you can use
dragons in a targeted way. That said, the Red Keep is pretty
well-fortified, so if Cersei, and Gregor Clegane, and Qyburn go
down and have the world’s most depressing coffee klatch in, you
know, the Black Cells or something, you are not necessarily going
to be able to get her with a targeted dragon fire strike. And if
you melt, you know, a city that has an enormous amount of both the
population and the economic activity of Westeros, that’s probably
not the greatest move long-term. I think a big problem with this
series beyond the questions of plot that Ilya talks about is that,
you know, there isn’t a sense of the society that Dany is here to
conquer, right? In the earlier seasons, we have some more sense of
the small folk. You have the folks who team up with the Brotherhood
Without Banners, you have people like Gendry who turns out to be
someone very famous and important, but is not at the moment. You
have people like Hot Pies. You have a sense of world that Dany
wants to conquer. That has essentially disappeared by this point in
the series. You know, right now the populous of Westeros is
essentially being represented by Randall and Dickon Tarly shortly
before they are roasted alive. And, you know, so those are the eyes
through which you are seeing this conquering force. And, frankly,
you know, this sort of invasion of not just a lady on a dragon but
people from a bunch of different cultures who, you know, the people
in Westeros have no experience with, and so you have no real sense
of how anyone is going to respond to Dany and that makes her, I
think, dilemmas harder to parse, because you don’t see her weighing
a population that she actually wants to rule, you just see her
moving pieces around on the painted table.

Peter Suderman: Yeah, I think this is probably
why I lean against firebombing King’s Landing. I mean, so much of
the show is not just concerned with the taking of power, but with
establishing that it is legitimate, and part of the reason why she
hesitates, a big part, is because she wants to establish herself as
a legitimate ruler who is accepted by the people of this world and
if you go and take, and use dragon fire to destroy even a small
part of King’s Landing, that is something people are going to
remember and it’s going to make it much harder to rule in the
aftermath.

Alyssa Rosenberg: Also, if you part of a
lineage where your father had a habit of just burning alive anyone
who bothered him, it’s probably not a great idea to just incinerate
an enormous number of people at will if you want to prove that
you’re different. It’s just a thought.

Caleb Watney: I think, though, this kind of
connects well and actually, Alyssa, you mentioned earlier, Daario
being stuck in Meereen. She is so obsessed with, you know, being
seen as legitimate in Westeros that she hightails it out of
Meereen, but given institutional stickiness, should we expect that
slavery is just going to, you know, leave Meereen? Won’t it
collapse back? Do we have any faith that Daario will be able to,
you know, maintain the break in institutions that she tried to put
in there? And if you don’t think it will stick, what should she
have done?

Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean, in the novel, slavery
comes back to Astapor, the first city that she conquers. You know,
she leaves a theoretically wise council of people to rule them and
then finds out six months later that people are desperately
desirous to sell themselves back into slavery so that they can have
something to do and something to eat, so I think the institutional
stickiness in Slaver’s Bay I would suspect is going to be low.

Ilya Somin: So, one of the strengths of the
series is that it does emphasize how effective transformation of
social problems and political systems does require institutional
solutions and not just putting the right person in power. And, both
in Westeros and in Essos, there is a lot of episodes and scenes, in
both the books and the movie — oh that’s right, a TV series
— which emphasized this, you know, whether Meereen will
revert back or not I think is kind of iffy. On the one hand, she
doesn’t really create that much in the way of an institutional
foundation. On the other hand, she does exterminate by this point
most of the preexisting ruling class, therefore it will be very
hard for them to get back into power, if only because most of them
are dead, they were killed in the initial sack of the city in the
Harpy rebellion, and then other such incidents in the Battle of
Meereen. Moreover, to the extent that most of the population,
including many of the people in power, or former slaves, or people
sympathetic to former slaves, it seems unlikely that slavery will
come back in its old form, but it is very possible that some other
form of tyranny or either some other form of forced labor, perhaps,
will come back. And while Daario is a very good military
strategist, it’s not that likely that he is a very competent
political leader or has great ideas for how to govern Meereen.
Maybe Daenerys has sent back some occasional instructions saying
well here’s some, you know, some other institutions you can
establish, but I’m not super optimistic on that point thought I
think it may well end up being better in the preexisting system so
the real criteria by which you judge progress is not, is there an
ideal Jeffersonian democracy here that has been established, it’s
is it better than a situation where a large proportion of
population was in slavery? I think the answer to that question
might be yes, even though overall by any objective standard it
still might be a pretty sucky society.

Matt Yglesias: You know, I think the track
record of this kind of violent overthrow of an existing political
order is often not that great. You know, we see in the real world
that there’s a tendency for a sort of a new regime created by force
to itself become authoritarian. I think the question here is, you
know, is the baseline condition in old Meereen so bad that even a
not-that-great new situation you’d say, you know, it’s still an
improvement, all things considered. I think that’s what Ilya was
saying. You could also imagine, though, a situation, you know,
Russian Revolution style where you take a pretty bad regime,
overthrow it, and eventually what consolidates in its place is
something that is worse, and, you know, there’s not a lot of
thoughtfulness about this, right? I mean, when Daenerys wrestles
with this to an extent when she is the queen about what am I doing
here, but when she makes the decision to do the handoff to Daario,
she becomes very, I would say, cavalier about you know, what’s the
actual situation here? I mean, what’s Daario’s competency to do
this job in a way that’s consistent with her values, given how
difficult she, herself, has found it to execute on the plan that
she had. I think that, on some level, it seems like she is
recognizing that the task is harder than she had realized initially
and is happy to sort of wash her hands of it. We don’t see her all
that interested when she makes it over to Dragonstone in checking
in on Daario’s progress and, you know, I think that’s telling in
some ways.

Ilya Somin: Neither Daenerys nor virtually all
the other leaders that we see really think in terms of
institutions, as opposed to just putting the right person in power,
so, presumably she puts Daario in charge because, A, she has to put
him somewhere and she can’t take him with her, and B, because it
seems like he is still in love with her, he is not going to betray
her — probably, she hopes — and, you know, that’s about
as deeply as she had thought about this particular matter and she
doesn’t ask, you know, should there be some kind of checks and
balances? You know, what protections should there be for the
population? Should there be a, you know, a Bill of Rights, or even
a Magna Carta, or something of the sort, these kinds of thoughts
don’t really cross her mind.

Peter Suderman: I mean, regardless of what
happens I think it reflects rather poorly on Daenerys as a leader.
And, you know, in some ways the show sets her up to be this kind of
moral, you know, this extremely moral person who we are supposed
to, you know, think oh, this is a good leader, and in fact she is
really not. I mean, like all Targaryens, she is kind of power mad
and doesn’t really think about her subjects except to the extent
that they make her feel good.

Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, and part of what we
see, both in Meereen and in Westeros, is that she is relatively
uninterested in the actual questions of governance, right? I mean,
when Tyrion raises the possibility of figuring out a succession
sort of as a way of broaching what the actual form of government is
going to be like, she basically has a temper tantrum. You know, in
Meereen, she is basically leaving behind her hunky sellsword
because he is nice, or loyal, or he thinks she is really hot and so
he won’t betray her, I mean there’s not a theory of governance
here. There’s a lot of talk about breaking the wheel, but there is
very little analysis of what the wheel is made of, what it would
take to break it, and what you build in its place to have as a
structure to hold up the rest of your society.

Caleb Watney: So, what would it mean to break
the wheel? Tyrion, you know, brings up, I think a couple episodes
ago, that she should start thinking about her succession plan and
he kind of briefly lists, you know, you could try doing a more
democratic election. Would that work in Westeros? What’s the best
strategy for her to practically break the wheel?

Matt Yglesias: I mean, it seems like you need
some kind of move toward a rule of law. I mean, I think that even
talking about how are you going to select the next king or queen is
almost not quite the point. As far as we can tell, there are no
real legal institutions at all operating. They have this trial by
combat system that is absurd…

Peter Suderman: Or sometimes trial by Sansa
saying you’re dead.

Matt Yglesias: Right. And there’s a brief
moment, right, as the High Sparrow and his movement begin to sort
of gain steam, when you could imagine a kind of productive tension
between church and state emerging that would create some kind of
competing power centers and agreed-upon rules, although it instead
immediately tips toward him seeming to have absolute power and then
Cersei blowing everybody up and then people seeming to accept that
as a legitimate source of political authority. But this is the
crucial development, I think, that you see in societies as they
begin to take off before any kind of real political democracy you
have some sort of checks and balances on the power of the king,
some kind of acknowledge limits, and Daenerys does not seem at all
inclined to that. The reliance on dragons that comes from her
family and that she has, herself, is very, is antithetical to the
notion of some kind of a social compact with other competing
elements because she monopolizes the dragons.

Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, the closest thing you
have to a colonel of both the rule of law and a democratic system
is the Night’s Watch, right? I mean, the Night’s Watch is the
social institution that sort of stands apart from any particular
regime, but provides a ballast to it, right? If you have committed
a crime either, you know, against person or property or against the
regime, you can go to the wall, have that wiped out, but also be
sort of removed from politics. The wall itself is governed by a
rough rule of law if you desert, if you are treasonous to it,
theoretically if you run off to Mole’s Town and get a little
something, something, you can be punished in a variety of ways. You
have a democratic election system, you have sort of a governance
structure underneath the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and
part of what is really sad about the story of the Night’s Watch
over the series is that you see that become corrupted and fall
apart. You know, you have the massacre at Craster’s, when Lord
Commander Mormont leads the rangers beyond the wall that sort of
upends that structure that has been durable and then is no longer.
Part of what is sort of dangerous that you see happening with Dany
right now, nobody is running off to consult with poor Dolorous Edd
at Castle Black, they are just running around essentially
performing the functions of the Night’s Watch rather than
incorporating any of that expertise beyond sort of Tormund and Jon
and, you know, bits and bobs of all of that floating around. So,
you have this nascent institution that, you know, has opinions
about how society should be run, has expertise, is not necessarily
sort of as cloistered as the Maesters, and that provides a, you
know, sort of a social outlet in society, but over the course of
the series it falls apart.

Ilya Somin: Yeah. So, I think the key here that
unifies many of these comments is thinking in institutional terms
and also of decentralization of power, so competing power centers,
like actually emerge in medieval Europe, free cities, merchant’s
guilds, trading centers, nobles who had some kind of authority that
couldn’t just be overridden by the crown anytime and there are a
lot of other things like that. In Westeros, virtually all the
competing forces, despite their differences on other issues, they
still think in personalistic terms, putting the right person in
power, in particularly the right person on the throne. So, I think
the problem is not that Daenerys doesn’t care about the people or
that some other ruler does, but I think she actually does, at least
more than the others. She frees tens of thousands of slaves, that’s
more than any of the others have accomplished to any significant
degree, but she, too, has this intellectual limitation that she
thinks mainly in personalistic terms. She talks about breaking the
wheel, and so there’s a sense it can be a different system, but it
seems like her thinking about what that system would be like hasn’t
progressed beyond, I will be on the throne and I will not be a bad
person like my father was, like Cersei is, and like all these other
people are, and, you know, once I’ve done that everything will, you
know, naturally work itself out. And you can see well, she’s
obviously stupid and blind, but this is a way of thinking which is
endemic to that society and actually too much of our real-world
history, as well. We see it even today in liberal democratic
societies, where candidates promise us things like, I will bring
change you can believe in, or, you know, give me power, I alone can
do it, I will solve your problems. That’s a better and easier
campaign strategy than saying well, you know, I will build some
good institutions and there will be some good incentives to promote
more economic growth, right? That doesn’t fit in your thirty-second
ad very well. And, so, given that we are prone to this way of
thinking ourselves, it shouldn’t surprise us that people in
personalistic societies are even more prone to it.

Peter Suderman: Yeah, I mean the first step
towards breaking the wheel is to figure out a transition mechanism,
and those are very difficult to figure out in any society. If you
look at some of the economics research on cooperation games, it is
really, really difficult to setup rules where people will
effectively and productively cooperate with each other. In most of
these games the typical outcome is failure, where everybody just
starts punishing each other, because altruistic punishers end up
basically saying no, I don’t care if it hurts me, I am actually
going to hurt you because I dislike you for some reason. I’m not
going to trade with you, I’m not going to do anything productive.
And so, probably what they need is some sort of pilot program. Some
way that they can setup like little cities, little zones…

Alyssa Rosenberg: Wasn’t that supposed to be
Slaver’s Bay? I mean, Slaver’s Bay is essentially the sort of
experimentation zone.

Peter Suderman: I mean, but not just one. You
need, you know, half a dozen, dozens of these things, and you need
to build in conditions for success and conditions for failure and
with any society you need to spend some time figuring out what
works, and that’s something that no one in Game of Thrones
does. They are not really concerned with the quality of the rules
and the effectiveness of the social rules that surround them,
because everybody is either out to side with power or take it for
themselves. And so you don’t really see, you just don’t see a kind
of systematic thinking about how to setup a society that is going
to be materially different, that is going to be productive, that is
going to advance and be better, not just for those who are taking
power, but for the subjects and for the little people who are sort
of underneath them.

Matt Yglesias: I mean, we have talked about
this a lot in the context of Daenerys, but I think it’s even more
striking with Robb Stark, who is trying to found a whole new
political entity, the Kingdom of the North, he proclaimed himself
king, and then the first thing he does is sort of invade the
Westerlands. Because he knows how to fight and he knows who his
enemies are, and he has this military cast behind him that has
anointed him as the king, but he doesn’t have any vision at any
point in time of…

Peter Suderman: Institutional inertia is
real.

Matt Yglesias: …what the Kingdom of the North
is, or even what it is for, or why a typical northern person who
doesn’t have a personal grudge against the Lannister family would
want to care about any of this, and it leads him in some ways to
his ultimately unsound, kind of, military approach, right? I mean,
why can’t they wage a defensive battle to secure their homes and
their homeland is in part, I think, tied to the fact that they
don’t have a natural agenda for building this new kingdom, this new
nation. When Jon puts himself in essentially the same position, he
at least has the excuse that, you know, these zombies are a much
more real and acute threat to common people than the Lannisters
ever were and the sort of need to mobilize for the military
emergency I think you can sympathize with. But, to proclaim
yourself the political leader of a brand new country and then have
nothing to say about how things are going to impact you, you
started with that quote about, you know, Aragorn’s tax policy, but
I mean, what’s Robb Stark’s tax policy?

Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, and part of what you
see dying in the early season, in the first season of Game of
Thrones, is that distinct sense of northern identity. I mean,
you know, you have Bran saying, you know, our way is the old way,
going out to see his father behead the deserter from the Night’s
Watch. I mean, Ned Stark is sort of the repository of the idea of a
particular kind of northern justice and identity and also, frankly,
a defensive strategy. One of the things you see in the first season
is him telling Howland Reed, who is this old comrade of his, to
secure the Neck, which is this sort of narrow passage to the north
in this swampy region. And so, again, there is the idea of the
defensive strategy, the distinct northern kingdom. And remember, I
mean, these were the Seven Kingdoms. Robb and Jon aren’t so much
trying to found something new as kind of break the confederacy of
the Seven Kingdoms and return to a time when the north was ruled
independently, but that institutional memory and that sort of
cultural identity have been disintegrating, and disintegrate
further over the course of the series. In a lot of ways Game of
Thrones is a story about losing all of the tools that you need
to break the wheel and build something new.

Caleb Watney: Yeah. Well, that brings us to our
final section, which is on culture. So, my first question here is:
Assuming the White Walkers can be driven back, Dany has still
brought over a massive tribe of Dothraki, who are very different
culturally from, you know, the rest of Westeros’s society. So, how
can the leaders facilitate assimilation of the Dothraki into
Westeros’s society, assuming that assimilation is even desirable or
feasible.

Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean, not just the
Dothraki, the Unsullied, right? You effectively imported five or
six thousand people who can’t have kids, who are incredibly
culturally distinct, almost to the point of monasticism. And so,
it’s not just, you know, let’s bring a lot of Mongol hoards to
England, you have a bunch of different groups who, frankly, don’t
seem poised to get along terribly well. I mean, the Unsullied also
don’t have, you know, skills other than fighting people, so you’ve
got sort of a surplus of people who are essentially professional
soldiers.

Ilya Somin: So, both of these groups pose
problems, like one is more severe than the others. The Unsullied
are actually sort of a self-limiting problem…

Alyssa Rosenberg: Yeah.

Ilya Somin: …for one thing they cannot
reproduce, and therefore there really will not be sort of a
permanent restive minority. Moreover, as they get older they would
be less of a problem. Lots of social science shows that as men age
they are less likely to be violent, they are less likely to engage
in the kind of activities that we see younger men engaging in in
Westeros, but also sometimes in real life. And, in addition, there
is an obvious potential role for them. They can be a kind of
standing army and Westeros is large enough and wealthy enough they
can probably support a few thousand Unsullied as a standing army,
especially since there will be some attrition from the war against
the Night King. There probably already has been attrition of the
Unsullied. One of the logistical issues they haven’t dealt with
well is you know, how do the Unsullied find replacements for
casualties, since no more new Unsullied, presumably I hope, are
being produced. The Dothraki are much more a problem, partly
because there are many more of them. They are a whole society, not
just a military unit, and obviously they have a culture of rape and
pillage and other unsavory kinds of activities, to the extent that
the historical analogy to them is the Mongols, there is actually a
history of the Mongols over time settling down in some of the areas
they conquered, particularly in China, and to some degree
assimilating one can imagine that, you know, they could take up
professions like raising horses or even farming, and the like, and
some of them also could do long-term military service depending on
whether Daenerys wants to fight additional wars or not, assuming
she is still in power at the end of conflict. But this would be
more of a problem than the other one, and it doesn’t seem to be a
problem that she has thought carefully about, though it might be
mitigated somewhat in that she’s not just their leader now, she’s
this great sort of mythical religious figure, so at least for a
time they might obey orders from her that they don’t particularly
like just because they hold her so much in awe, but if she ends up
trying to suppress their culture and do things which they consider
really unnatural or unpleasant or just not much fun, you know, over
time that loyalty might win. Maybe there would be a follow-up
series, you know, tales of the Dothraki or something, and how they
try to assimilate to Westeros or fail to do so.

Matt Yglesias: And optimistically, Westeros
does seem to have a fairly robust tradition of religious toleration
that is unlike the history of Europe, that you have the old gods
and the new, they seem to tolerate the Growned God perhaps to a
fault over there, and the Iron islanders, though, are an
interesting perhaps precursor of what we are looking at with the
Dothraki, where they have been incorporated into the Seven
Kingdoms, but never really in a comfortable way, right? There’s
this recurrence throughout history of Iron islander rebellions,
strong, effective kings kind of try and keep their antics tamped
down, and they raid elsewhere, but it’s been a system for, you
know, sort of getting them to pledge personal allegiance to various
kinds of kings without actually following the law in any kind of
way, and I think that that would be the sort of, to me, risk with
the Dothraki, is that they will remain loyal to Daenerys that to
the extent that she delivers sort of personal, forceful orders to
them, don’t do this, don’t do that, you know, they will listen to
her but that fundamentally this is a group of people that is not
interested in sort of settling down and becoming small-scale
farmers or whatever it is that you might do in Westeros and they
don’t have the institutional capacity to sort of enforce that kind
of rule on them. They have also, I mean, they have come here as
conquerors and it is at odds with Daenerys’s aspiration to not just
sort of burn everyone to death, right? I mean, if she did come in
and just sort of kill everyone, then you could assimilate the
Dothraki as a new, kind of ruling class, but she doesn’t want to do
that, but then you’re going to have a real challenge of
coexistence.

Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean…

Peter Suderman: I think is where the rule of
law nonviolence, you know, the expectation of nonviolence comes in,
right? And that’s just not something that Daenerys has ever had for
the Dothraki, for over reasons, right? She has, in fact, expected
them to be quite violent, encouraged them, and so, you know,
integration means that you are going to have to have, and the idea
of equality under the law, and consistence. Perhaps not overly
harsh, but consistent punishment for infractions, as well as kind
of a concerted effort to integrate the Dothraki into society and to
give them economic opportunity you have to show them that there is
something better than the, you know, the life of horse riding and
rape and pillage, which, you know, might be a little bit difficult,
but I think this is just, this is one of those issues where someone
like Daenerys is going to have a really hard time thinking about
this simply because she is so disinterested in questions of
institutional incentives and the idea of a kind of basic equality
under the law.

Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean, I think, to circle
back around, though, we know that the Dothraki are riding hard up
the Kingsroad, they are supposed to be at Winterfell in a
fortnight, existential threats can also be a great transformer. One
thing we’ve seen that since Jon let the wildlings through the wall,
and got murdered for it, is that the existential threat faced by
the north has pretty much eliminated the problems that everyone
expected to emerge when the wildlings crossed the wall. Tormund is
commanding at Eastwatch and that’s apparently going okay. You know,
that has not been some sort of recurring problem for Sansa and Arya
up at Winterfell. You know, maybe one of the things about the Night
King is not only does he turn everyone he touches into dead people,
but turns everyone he faces into citizens of Westeros.

Ilya Somin: Maybe, but I think a lot of this
also is tied into the economic issues that we started out with and
that with both the Dothraki and the Ironborn, one of the main
reasons why they rape and pillage is because it is a lot better
than the alternatives that they have available to them, so you can
either scrounge for a living on the Iron Islands, you know, among
the rocks or whatever, or you can, you know, rape, pillage, and
steal cool stuff. And that second alternative looks pretty good
compared to the first one, and similarly, with the, you know, the
Dothraki, and it’s only if there is a job market and economic
growth which provides opportunity. And this is actually true with
real-world immigration in the U.S. Immigrants have much lower crime
rates than natives. One reason why because they integrate into the
job market. In countries where refugees don’t integrate into the
job market, the job market has closed, like in some European
countries the situation is worse. So, hereto having a more dynamic
economic system, if that exists, you might say you know what,
risking my life is not as good an idea as doubling or tripling my
wealth over the next ten years without risking my life. If, on the
other hand, the only alternative is either near starvation or rape
and pillage, go rape and pillage would be the, you know, the answer
to that for many people.

Caleb Watney: Well, I am next going to move us
into taking some questions from Twitter, and then also from the
audience. So, I’ll start off with one from Twitter: Thinking about
sort of Game of Thrones houses as almost corporate
entities, how can they maintain policy goals over successive
generations? Is there kind of like a principal actor problem
here?

Ilya Somin: I don’t think necessarily because
unlike corporations, these are essentially family businesses,
right? And the reason, ideally at least, why people can trust each
other is they are all family, they all have this same goal of
keeping up the wealth and power of the house over time. Now, in
families like the Lannisters and the Targaryens and some others,
this sort of breaks down and you have sibling antagonisms or even
people killing their parents and so forth, but in general part of
the reason for family-run institutions is precisely to reduce
principal wage and problems, to make it easier for people to trust
each other. Of course you do face the problem that sometimes the
most competent person is not actually a member of the family, and
that’s one reason why the family-run business model is not always
the best model for a lot of social institutions, but for more sort
of personalistic societies which are overall low-trust societies,
it sort of makes sense and you see time and again even a
dysfunctional family like the Lannisters, we are all Lannisters, we
should be able to get together, we should serve the family and, you
know, we see that recently with Sansa and Arya, the Stark sisters,
getting back together and so forth. So, this is a society where
it’s on the whole much easier to build trust between relatives than
it is to build trust in more impersonal ways.

Peter Suderman: Clear mission statements. And
I’m not entirely kidding. I’m a little bit kidding. The Lannisters
are known for what? They always pay their debts, and this is
something that is a clear part of the family identity that has been
passed down through generations and has stuck. And it is because it
is clear, it is easy to teach, and then can demonstrate its
importance to the family’s fortunes, both politically and
economically. And so those sorts of mission statements can help the
families maintain a kind of a clarity about what they want to do,
what they exist to do, and to keep that going through successive
generations.

Caleb Watney: Great. Next question: Which of
the four major religions, the Seven, the Lord of Light, the red
god, or the Drowned God, seems the most conducive to ongoing
societal development?

Matt Yglesias: Well, the Lord of Light can
bring people back from the dead, which I think is pretty
impressive. They dance over that pretty casually in the show. And
like Jon mentions it and then people are like, oh, that’s
interesting. There’s no like well, maybe we should track down the
woman who did that, and even if we think she gave some bad advice
in the past, like put her to work, try to understand this, talk to
the Maesters, see how it works, I mean this is part of what we were
talking about, the lack of progress there. I mean, it’s a sort of
known fact that some of these red priests can resurrect people, but
nobody seems to really like hone in on that fact or try to explore
it or exploit in any kind of way, but it’s definitely an impressive
quality.

Ilya Somin: One of the many reasons why the
White expedition was very foolish is that they lost Thoros of Myr,
a man who is much more valuable than the White because he actually
can raise people from the dead, which seems like a pretty useful
skill that you might want to have. It just seems that way to me. I
doubt that any of these religions are really all that conducive to
progress but I do think historically religions that are more
pluralistic may be more conducive to it in that a monotheistic
religion makes a strong claim this is the only god, anybody who
doesn’t believe in that god or our particular interpretation of him
is a heretic and should be suppressed, for obvious reasons that’s
more problematic for intellectual and scientific progress in a
religion that says well, there’s a bunch of gods. There might be
more. It’s sort of pluralistic in the way that perhaps ancient
Greek and Roman religion was, where they pretty readily assimilated
new ideas and even new gods from other societies because the claims
of the existing gods were less clearly exclusive. That said, you
know, none of these religions are all that oriented towards
progress and it may be that either you need some sort of
reformation within the existing religion or you need more secular
belief systems rising or some combination of the two.

Caleb Watney: Great. We’ll take one more
question from Twitter, which is: Could the Unsullied function as
some sort of administrative group like Ottoman janissaries?

Ilya Somin: The janissaries were not an
administrative group. They were actually mercenaries in a special
unit of troops in the Ottoman Empire, so yes, they could be like
janissaries in that a military force that is of a different ethnic
or racial group than the dominant population and it is kept out of
politics but obviously it is self-limiting because they will get
older or there will be casualties and they can’t really be
replaced, whereas, of course, the janissaries could.

Caleb Watney: Great. Okay, we are going to take
a couple of questions from the audience now. Sir — up front
in the red shirt.

Audience Member #1: So, what we’ve been doing
so far is kind of in-universe analysis of Westeros, but stepping
back, you know, the god of Westeros is George R. R. Martin and he
is the one that has been interfering with things and making them
what they are. The showrunners, obviously of the TV show, but
George R. R. Martin is known for subverting expectations over and
over again in his fiction. And if you would think about something,
what is the ultimate expectation of the series of books and shows
that is going to be subverted by George in the future if he ever
finishes it?

Alyssa Rosenberg: Please!

Audience Member #1: Or is not finishing it the
subverted expectation?

Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, I mean I have to say,
you know The Wheel of Time series kind of beat him to that and
Brandon Sanderson has already said that he will not finish Game
of Thrones because of the sexual and violent content in the
series. I mean, I wrote a piece about this earlier this year and I
think that, you know, when it comes down to it, high fantasy is
generally a story about a hero who does something good with magic,
and by his personal goodness, restores order to the world. And I
think that there are two ways that you can subvert that narrative,
right? Either the hero doesn’t restore order to the world, the
Night King conquers Westeros and sits on a cold throne and the
continent becomes dead and completely stagnant, or you can have a
story where the hero is on some level victorious but is so sort of
morally and psychologically destroyed by the experience that it’s
impossible to feel any pleasure in the victory. And you know, to a
certain extent you get a little bit of that in Tolkien. You know,
Frodo can’t really live in human society anymore and has to go off
and live among the Elves, but come on, that’s a pretty good option.
The Elves are awesome. But I think, I mean, one, there has been a
certain amount of speculation that Jon is this figure from the
novels who is not, sort of not as prominent from the show but this
figure of legend, Azor Ahai, who threw off the Long Night by
tempering this magical sword that Stannis Baratheon is supposed to
have. It’s really amazing how much of this stuff is just lingering
around my brain. I wonder what would happen if I just deleted all
of it. I would probably, you know, win the Nobel Prize. But so, in
the legend, Azor Ahai tempers this magical sword by killing his
wife with it. And so, you could see an ending of this where Jon
kills Dany, thereby forging a magical sword that allows him to kill
the Night King, but what is it worth it if he doesn’t have love, or
something like that. So, I mean, I think either you don’t get the
happy ending, or the happy is so compromised that it sort of plays
against your enjoyment of it. Those would be my two guesses.

Ilya Somin: There’s a third type of subversion
that could happen, and that is, instead of the outcome either being
an ambiguous ending or a sad ending which would be one type of
subversion, it could be that there might be a kind of happy ending,
but it occurs through some kind of institutional change as opposed
to the right person, the good person coming to power. So, instead
of Aragorn getting on the throne and ruling for a century and
solving the problems of Middle Earth to some degree, you have some
kind of more institutional fix, though I would not that some of the
issues with Aragorn are dealt with in the appendices in the
Lord of the Rings, where it is described that people
didn’t just live happily ever after and he did do some
institutional changes, so perhaps that could be our next panel, the
appendices to Lord of the Rings and the institutional
lessons that they teach us.

Alyssa Rosenberg: I’m there. I’m here for
it.

Ilya Somin: Great.

Matt Yglesias: You know, I mean, it’s possible
that the Night King is going to come down to King’s Landing, he is
going to raise a lot of the points that we had here, and say you
know, you guys really need to think about the structure of your
society or something. I mean, he seems to have things pretty well
together as far as we can tell up north.

Ilya Somin: Need to think about integrating the
undead better.

Matt Yglesias: Right. And, you know, like, what
are you doing, Dothraki, like this just doesn’t really make sense,
and some off-stage characters we’ve forgotten about. Poor Edmure, I
think, is still kicking around somewhere, and he could work out a
deal, and, you know, that would subvert things.

Peter Suderman: I mean the big question that
George R. R. Martin is asking with the series is do heroes win by
virtue of being heroes? And maybe even in a larger way, do heroes
even exist? Is this idea of a good person, an essentially good
person who deserves to win, is that something that is real? And,
so, my expectation is a lot like Alyssa’s, that the end will in
some profound and substantive way answer no, or we can’t really be
sure of that.

Caleb Watney: Great. We’ll take one more
question.

Alyssa Rosenberg: You’re drawing this out
here.

Caleb Watney: I want you to raise your hand
higher, show that you really want it. Sir in the green shirt.

Ilya Somin: When you play the game of
hands…

Alyssa Rosenberg: You raise or you die.

Caleb Watney: You get chosen or you don’t.
There’s no dying.

Ilya Somin: All hands must die.

Audience Member #2: Could part of the economic
stagnation be the Iron Bank’s fault and should they audit and end
the Iron Bank?

Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean, as far as we can tell
the Iron Bank lends to everybody, as opposed to, you know, House
Lannister or House Tyrell, so they are probably a force for more
economic — I don’t know the terms for these things, I’m just
a critic — but they are probably a greater engine for
economic growth than the systems of lending through the noble
houses, wouldn’t we think, right? I mean, they are also, you know,
run out of the free city of Bravos, and so my guess would be that
they have a more expansive approach to all of this than some of the
more traditional Westerosi banking institutions.

Peter Suderman: I’m not pro-Lannister or
anything, but I’m always impressed by Cersei being the only person
on the show who actually seems to understand fiscal policy and the
use of, and like the importance of credit. And you saw this in this
season, right, is that like she understands oh, I can borrow and I
can use that and I can use our house’s good name…

Alyssa Rosenberg: But Golden Company was
founded by Targaryen, you know, illegitimate Targaryens. They are
not going for Cersei.

Matt Yglesias: It would be good to have
historical price data about Westeros, and so we could really assess
what is going on. I think…

Peter Suderman: This is what the Maesters
should be doing, right?

Alyssa Rosenberg: We actually do have a certain
amount of historical price data in the first novels, when you see
prices escalating for just like regular — what is the word
for things that you have to have? Staples.

Matt Yglesias: …but you know, if you look
back at like the Dunk and Egg Tales, or the Princess and the Queen
and try to look at prices from the distant past and see if there is
an inflationary pattern, I am afraid in my brief efforts to look
into this, Martin has been a little sloppy in terms of saying what
things cost over time and it makes it difficult to really assess,
you know, whether the Iron Bank is overprinting.

Ilya Somin: That’s the whole reason why they
had to appoint Littlefinger as the master of coin so that he could
sort out the price level and have an inflation target.

Caleb Watney: Great. Okay, and then the very
last question, I just want a two-word answer from each of you. Who
is the most likely to end up on the Iron Throne and who should end
up on the Iron Throne? Feel free to start wherever you want.

Matt Yglesias: I think most likely it’s Jon,
but it should be the Night King.

Ilya Somin: It’s a close call and most likely
but probably Jon, though Daenerys has a very real possibility as
well. On the other question, it’s very easy, no one.

Alyssa Rosenberg: Dolorous Edd institutes
democratic socialism?

Peter Suderman: Yeah, my colleague Robby Soave
made a compelling case that it is actually going to be Sansa who
ends up ruling and that this last episode sort of is setting up
Sansa as an effective administrator but I agree, the Iron Throne
should be destroyed. There should be no one.

Caleb Watney: Great. Well, give a hand to all
of our panelists. I think they deserve it.